Northumberland Yesterday and To-day eBook

It is difficult to believe that so lately as the years
1858-60, the “bar” at the mouth of the
Tyne was an insuperable obstacle to all but vessels
of very moderate draught; and that ships might lie
for days, and sometimes weeks, after being loaded,
before there came a tide high enough to carry them
out to sea. The river was full of sand-banks,
and little islands stood here and there—­one
in mid-stream, where the ironclads are now launched
at Elswick. Three or four vessels might be seen
at once bumping and grounding on the “bar”
unable to make their way over. Well might the
old song say—­

“The ships are all at the bar,
They canna get up to Newcastle!”

An old map of the Tyne shows a number of sand-banks
down the lower reaches of the river, with ships aground
on each, of them.

But the River Tyne Commissioners have changed all
that, and their implement of warfare has been the
hideous but necessary dredger. No longer need
vessels of heavy tonnage desert the Tyne for the Wear,
as they were perforce driven to do during the first
half of the nineteenth century, for the Wearsiders
had set about deepening and widening their river long
before the Tynesiders did the same by theirs.
Considerable and continuous pressure had to be brought
to bear on the civic authorities at Newcastle before
they finally took action; but having once done so,
the future of the Tyne was assured. Now it ranks
second only to the Thames in the actual number of
vessels entering and leaving, and owns only the Mersey
its superior in the matter of tonnage.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER IV.

NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE.

“Her dusky hair in many a tangle
clings
About her, and her looks, though stern
and cold,
Grow tender with the dreams of by-gone
days.”

—­W.W. Tomlinson.

The outward signs of “by-gone days,” in
the Newcastle of to-day, with the one notable exception
of the Castle, must be diligently sought out amongst
the overwhelming mass of what is often called “rampant
modernity,” of which the town to-day chiefly
consists. The modernity, however, is not all
bad, as this favourite phrase would imply; much of
it is doubtless regrettable and a very little of it
perhaps inevitable; but no one will deny either the
modernity or the beauty of Grey Street, one of the
finest streets in any English town; or the fine appearance
of Grainger Street, Blackett Street, Eldon Square,
or any other of the stately thoroughfares with which
Grainger and Dobson enriched the town within the last
eighty years—­no one, that is, who has learned
to “lift his eyes to the sky-line in passing
along a thoroughfare” instead of keeping them
firmly fixed at the level of shop windows.